Food & Water

Their results, reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, show that the ice is melting much more rapidly than previously thought due to inflowing warm water. “The stability of ice shelves is generally thought to be related to their exposure to warm deep ocean water, but we’ve found that solar heated surface water also plays a crucial role in melting ice shelves,” said first author Dr Craig Stewart from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand, who conducted the work while a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. “Previous studies have shown that when ice shelves collapse, the feeding glaciers can speed up by a factor or two or three,” said co-author Dr Poul Christoffersen from Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute.
Data from the instruments deployed on the mooring showed that solar heated surface water flows into the cavity under the ice shelf near Ross Island, causing melt rates to nearly triple during the summer months.
This area, known as the Ross Sea Polynya, absorbs solar heat quickly in summer and this solar heat source is clearly influencing melting in the ice shelf cavity. “Climate change is likely to result in less sea ice, and higher surface ocean temperatures in the Ross Sea, suggesting that melt rates in this region will increase in the future,” said Stewart.
Rapid melting identified by the study happens beneath a thin and structurally important part of the ice shelf, where the ice pushes against Ross Island. “The observations we made at the front of the ice shelf have direct implications for many large glaciers that flow into the ice shelf, some as far as 900 km away,” said Christoffersen.
The point of vulnerability lies in the fact that that solar heated surface water flows into the cavity near a stabilising pinning point, which could be undermined if basal melting intensifies further.
The researchers point out that melting measured by the study does not imply that the ice shelf is currently unstable.

Hydrogen will play a key role in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.
It can be sustainably produced by using solar energy to split water molecules.
The resulting clean energy can be stored, used to fuel cars or converted into electricity on demand.
But making it reliably on a large scale and at an affordable cost is a challenge for researchers.
Efficient solar hydrogen production requires rare and expensive materials — for both the solar cells and the catalyst — in order to collect energy and then convert it.
The scientists used the LRESE’s unique solar simulator to demonstrate the stable performance of their device.
The results from the lab-scale demonstrations were so promising that the device has been upscaled and is now being tested outdoors, on EPFL’s Lausanne campus.
For distributed, large-scale hydrogen generation, several concentrator systems could be used together to produce hydrogen at chemical plants or for hydrogen stations.
As part of their research, the scientists also performed a technological and economic feasibility study and developed an open-source software program called SPECDO (Solar PhotoElectroChemical Device Optimization.
This program can help engineers design components for low-cost photoelectrochemical systems for producing solar hydrogen.

A report on the state of New Zealand’s environment has painted a bleak picture of catastrophic biodiversity loss, polluted waterways and the destructive rise of the dairy industry and urban sprawl.
Environment Aotearoa is the first major environmental report in four years, and was compiled using data from Statistics New Zealand and the environment ministry.
It presents a sobering summary of a country that is starkly different from the pristine landscape promoted in the “Pure New Zealand” marketing campaign that lures millions of tourists every year.
It found New Zealand is now considered one of the most invaded countries in the world, with 75 animal and plant species having gone extinct since human settlement.
‘Their birthright is being lost’: New Zealanders fret over polluted rivers Read more Almost two-thirds of New Zealand’s rare ecosystems are under threat of collapse, and over the last 15 years the extinction risk worsened for 86 species, compared with the conservation status of just 26 species improving in the past 10 years.
“Four thousand of our native species are in trouble … from rampant dairy conversions to destructive seabed trawling – [we] are irreversibly harming our natural world.” The minister for the environment, David Parker, said the report offered “no big surprises” but reinforced the importance of cleaning up the waterways and becoming carbon neutral by 2050.
“If, with all our advantages, New Zealand can’t overcome its environmental problems, then the world won’t,” Parker said.
During her election campaign, the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, pledged to make the country’s rivers and lakes swimmable again for the next generation.
Some 57% of monitored lakes registered poor water quality, and 76% of native freshwater fish are at risk of or threatened with extinction.
Forest and Bird said the main culprits for worsening freshwater quality were the intensive use of fertilisers, irrigation and cows.

A study published today in Nature Communications by researchers at San Diego State University (SDSU), the University of Hawai’i at M?noa, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and others revealed that the bacteria present in the water overlying dozens of coral reefs changed dramatically during the night, and then returned to the same daytime community as observed the morning before.
Further, as if these communities were all privy to the same schedule, these changes were synchronized across reefs separated by hundreds of miles. “Investigations of day-night rhythms of reef processes are required to holistically understand the functional roles of microbial players in these ecosystems,” said Linda Wegley Kelly, adjunct assistant research professor at SDSU and co-lead author of the study.
Collecting samples in this way, the researchers measured changes in the water chemistry and the types of microbes present compared to the daytime at numerous sites.
The team also used genomic tools to show how these community changes determine the microbial processes in reefs that differ day and night. “Previous studies of marine microbes have shown that different functional groups change their activity over the day, but microbial populations remain relatively constant over diel cycles,” said Craig Nelson, assistant professor of oceanography at the UH M?noa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology and study co-lead.
Surprisingly, Psychrobacter can make up 40-70% of the marine microbial community during the day, and is a hundred-times more abundant than during the night.
But what is influencing Psychrobacter? “The changes we observed in microbe composition over a day-night cycle imply that coral reef habitats manipulate the surrounding seawater — both the chemistry and microbiology — based on the diurnal and nocturnal activities of the collective local biota,” said Kelly.
The study also uncovered the important role of nighttime microbes in recycling nutrients on reefs.”

They can sometimes be a health hazard.
Little research has been conducted into the spread and distribution of faecal bacteria in rivers and, above all, into their input from the surrounding landscape.
Researchers from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) and from Scotland’s University of Aberdeen have developed an indicator-based model that can be used to assess the dynamics of faecal bacteria such as E. coli on the basis of hydrological processes in the landscape and the connectivity of streams — an important basis for managing the acute or sustained microbial contamination of waters.
To be able to understand the spread and fate of faecal bacteria in waters, scientists must also record the areas of origin, the quantity, and the flow paths of water in the landscape, and take into account inputs to the river network.
Based on a study area in Scotland, Doerthe Tetzlaff from IGB, her doctoral student Aaron Neill and their colleagues from the University of Aberdeen (Chris Soulsby and Norval Strachan) explored the spread of labelled faecal indicator organisms in a catchment area.
They then coupled the data to hydrometric values (quantitative determination of the hydrological regime) and stable isotope tracers. “Combining such data constitutes an innovative approach.
Exact prediction of faecal bacteria distribution in summer by the model Both the researchers’ field trials involving indicator bacteria and their mathematical model demonstrated that the degree of hydrological connectivity plays a crucial role in the distribution of faecal bacteria.
In summer, therefore, bacteria that do not originate from the immediate vicinity of the stream also enter the water, whereas in winter, bacteria stored in the riparian zone are mainly mobilised.
The model we developed successfully captures the actual distribution of bacteria in summer,” stated Doerthe Tetzlaff, outlining the results of the study.

Keeping inland lakes from turning green means less greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere and contributing to climate change.
Healthy drinking water, fishing and recreation opportunities are also increased when waters are not green.
When dense algae blooms die, the bacteria that decompose the algae also deplete oxygen in the water. “We estimate that the greening of the world’s lakes will increase the emission of methane into the atmosphere by 30 to 90 percent during the next 100 years,” said Jake Beaulieu of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and lead author of a paper on lake greening and greenhouse gas emissions published March 26, 2019 in the journal Nature Communications.
According to the authors, three distinct mechanisms are expected to induce increases in lake greening or eutrophication during the next 100 years.
At current rates of population growth and climate change, eutrophication in lakes will increase by 25 to 200 percent by 2050 and double or quadruple by 2100. “We used phosphorus because the relationship between phosphorus and plant or algae growth is well established,” said co-author Tonya DelSontro of the University of Geneva.
If the phosphorus in lakes triples, then methane emissions from lakes could be twice that of wetlands.”
By using global distribution of lake size and total lake area, climatic heating of lakes, future phosphorus concentrations and storm-driven nutrient runoff they were able to estimate future lake methane emissions, which the authors say has not been done before.
Additionally, local action to improve water quality could have important global consequences.

NASA research shows that Jakobshavn Glacier, which has been Greenland’s fastest-flowing and fastest-thinning glacier for the last 20 years, has made an unexpected about-face.
The researchers suspect the cold water was set in motion by a climate pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which causes the northern Atlantic Ocean to switch slowly between warm and cold every five to 20 years.
Water Temperature and Weather Jakobshavn, located on Greenland’s west coast, drains about 7 percent of the island’s ice sheet.
Because of its size and importance to sea level rise, scientists from NASA and other institutions have been observing it for many years.
Researchers hypothesized that the rapid retreat of the glacier began with the early 2000s loss of the glacier’s ice shelf — a floating extension of the glacier that slows its flow.
Jakobshavn has been accelerating each year since losing its ice shelf, and its front (where the ice reaches the ocean) has been retreating.
The team suspects that both the widespread Atlantic cooling and the dramatic cooling of the waters that reached the glacier were driven by the shift in the NAO.
If so, the cooling is temporary and warm waters will return when the NAO shifts to a warm phase once again.
We’ve shown that ocean temperatures can be just as important.”
The paper on the new research in Nature Geoscience is titled “Jakobshavn’s 20 Years of Acceleration and Thinning Interrupted by Regional Ocean Cooling.”

Stanford researchers have devised a way to generate hydrogen fuel using solar power, electrodes and saltwater from San Francisco Bay.
The findings, published March 18 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrate a new way of separating hydrogen and oxygen gas from seawater via electricity.
Tackling corrosion As a concept, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen with electricity — called electrolysis — is a simple and old idea: a power source connects to two electrodes placed in water.
During electrolysis, the nickel sulfide evolves into a negatively charged layer that protects the anode.
Without the negatively charged coating, the anode only works for around 12 hours in seawater, according to Michael Kenney, a graduate student in the Dai lab and co-lead author on the paper.
Previous studies attempting to split seawater for hydrogen fuel had run low amounts of electric current, because corrosion occurs at higher currents.
But they also designed a solar-powered demonstration machine that produced hydrogen and oxygen gas from seawater collected from San Francisco Bay.
And without the risk of corrosion from salts, the device matched current technologies that use purified water.
In the future, the technology could be used for purposes beyond generating energy.
Solar-driven, highly sustained splitting of seawater into hydrogen and oxygen fuels.

The microbial process of “nitrogen fixation” converts the element into a form that organisms can use, and was discovered recently in the frigid polar waters.
This shift may be a result of climate change and could affect global chemical cycles, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It was shocking to find this process in the Arctic,” said Deborah Bronk, one of the study’s authors and president and CEO of Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences.
Scientists long believed that the major nitrogen-fixing phytoplankton in the ocean lived only in warm waters, and that nitrogen fixation was essentially absent in the Arctic Ocean.
In 2017, Bronk and colleagues published a paper revealing that nitrogen fixation was in fact occurring in the Arctic Ocean, but they didn’t yet know which organism was responsible for the process. “The more we learn about the ocean, the more we see that organisms are incredibly plastic in what they can do and where they can live.”
As phytoplankton grow, they remove carbon from the ocean and ultimately the atmosphere — but they need nitrogen in order to do this, which UCYN-A may increasingly provide.
Continuing to investigate this process and incorporating it into global biogeochemical models will improve climate predictions and the understanding of important ocean cycles. “It is only because of past research that we were able to identify that this process is new,” Bronk said. “This study highlights the fact that sometimes not finding a process you are looking for is incredibly significant.

‘My body was rapidly unravelling’: living with motor neurone disease Read more Only 10% of MND cases are associated with genetic factors while the remaining 90% are associated with environmental and lifestyle factors.
Magoci’s activism led her to Prof Dominic Rowe and Prof Gilles Guillemin at the Macquarie University Centre for Motor Neurone Disease Research.
I don’t even want a cure; if I can find a treatment, something for my kids to hang on too, I will try it.” The Macquarie team created an MND biobank in 2012 to collect urine samples to screen and identify potential triggers from across the region, particularly from the families of MND sufferers.
But the scheme, which looks at the levels of potential environmental catalysts, has received no government support so Magoci is urging people in her area to donate samples.
Regional airlines cannot fly the samples, so Magoci drives them to Sydney because they have to be tested within 24 hours.
In Griffith, State Water has control in the river system before it passes to private company Murrumbidgee Irrigiation (MI) which delivers the water closer to the town before Griffith city council takes control.
MI do not guarantee water quality, they are an infrastructure company, a water delivery company.” Dalton says the algal blooms were happening in the wider region, including Menindee, Balranald and Hay.
“[The state government] are throwing money around like drunken sailors, so $2m should not be a lot in grand scheme of things.” Austin Evans, the state Nationals MP for Murray, says he would support funding for research but he is not “in charge of the purse strings”.
Evans also advocates funding to improve water quality in Lake Wyangan.
“MI and the council need to look at ways to improve water quality and lessen the chance of blue-green algae.” Griffith council did not return Guardian Australia’s calls but in February released a statement reassuring the local residents they were monitoring the water flow from the catchment area into the lake to determine how much sediment and nutrient runoff enters Lake Wyangan north.

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